A virtual environment is an interactive simulated environment accessed by multiple users through an online interface. Users inhabit and interact in the virtual environment via avatars, which are two or three-dimensional graphical representations of humanoids. There are many different types of virtual environments, however there are several features many virtual environments generally have in common:    A) Shared Space: the world allows many users to participate at once.    B) Graphical User Interface: the environment depicts space visually, ranging in style from 2D “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environments.    C) Immediacy: interaction takes place in real time.    D) Interactivity: the environment allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.    E) Persistence: the environment's existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.    F) Socialization/Community: the environment allows and encourages the formation of social groups such as teams, guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc.
An avatar can have a wide range of business and social experiences. Such business and social experiences are becoming more common and increasingly important in on-line virtual environments (e.g., universes, worlds, etc.), such as that provided in the on-line world Second Life (Second Life is a trademark of Linden Research in the United States, other countries, or both). The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as residents) with tools to view, navigate, and modify the Second Life world and participate in its virtual economy.
Second Life and other on-line virtual environments present a tremendous new outlet for both structured and unstructured virtual collaboration, gaming, exploration, commerce, and travel, as well as real-life simulations in virtual spaces. Virtual universes, such as Second Life, typically are run on a group of servers owned by the company that provides the virtual universe. As such, the computational and bandwidth load is very high so that the server machines become overloaded and poor performance results, e.g., time dilation. Poor performance may take the form of slow rendering and slow movement; or, the virtual universe simply “hanging,” which may force the user to leave the virtual universe.
With the increasing use of the virtual universe by an ever increasing number of avatars these performance issues are exacerbated. As one example of the challenge to users of a virtual universe, is the situation where a popular piece of land (e.g., casino) may be built near an existing homeowner and/or business property, thereby causing the homeowner and/or business property owner to suffer tremendously due to the aforementioned reduction of performance on their land (or being unable to access their land entirely) because computing and bandwidth resources are being used by the casino and its greater quantity of avatars and assets.